My first Nutanix .Next event

As a virtualization guy, I’m used to heard about HCI (Hyper Converged Infrastructure) since a couple of years now. Nutanix is a, if not the, leader in this area and this week took place their European annual event in Nice (France).

Organization

The event was sold out with more than 2 200 attendees and almost everything has been perfect in terms of organization. For me, the only “painful” point was the security checks at the convention center entrance. For that reason, I had to decide to not take my laptop bag to avoid the long queue for the scanning.

As said during the opening keynote, the session catalog is built in order to fit anyone’s expectations whenever he is in his journey to HCI/Nutanix. I have been impressed by the quality of the presentations and by the speakers.

There has been a couple of announcements that has been already relayed on Twitter. My major takeaway is the “one click failover / failback” to the cloud with Nutanix Xi. Powered by Google, this feature eases a Nutanix environment Disaster Recovery. The live demo during the keynote was fluid and well done. A couple of solutions are around the IoT and enable organization to deploy Nutanix solutions where the large amount of data is in order to avoid terabytes of data going to the cloud through the Internet connection. Going from a VM hosting platform, Nutanix is now able to host functions. The applications presented during the show were really impressive. For example, they choose to demonstrate that the product is able to analyze videos flows of an airport in order to count how many people are waiting in a specific area.

As an End User Computing focused guy, I found a couple of interesting sessions around this topic. I really loved the session made by my fellow CTP Kees Baggerman and Martijn Bosschaart about Citrix VDI and Nutanix. They present all the advantage that can be gained when you choose to host your Citrix VDI environment on Nutanix. They cover the “MCS/PVS” part and something more recent in the Nutanix portfolio: Acropolys File System. AFS allows (for this particular use case) the hosting of the users profiles and home directories with the guaranty to have the proximity between the users data and its VDI.

Networking opportunity

That’s the best part of the event. The solution expo and the different networking areas were perfect! I’m used to go to vendor conferences and it’s not always easy to find people to socialize with. This time, I had the opportunity to talk with a lot of new people and to meet lots of friends.